


pistola

by stight



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Pre-Canon, not nsfw, un-hiatused :)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:42:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27028282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stight/pseuds/stight
Summary: the story of how danny johnson became two, and how two became three.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 31





	1. wolf like me

“Sloppy, Mr. Johnson. Sloppy. This is rrr-eal sloppy.”

Danny Johnson pictures intestines like mincemeat glistening under a moth-infested streetlight. He pictures heads split open like watermelons, spilling juicy spoils onto the concrete below. He pictures dishevelled hands croaking at strange angles, like spit-roasted chicken’s feet from the Chinese takeout downtown.

What sits before him is his boss, an elderly guy from Boston with thin licks of hair clinging to his shiny scalp. And it’s almost lunchtime.

Danny pries a smile up on thin lips. “You gave me twenty-six hours’ time crunch, sir.”

What the fuck was he supposed to do?, he thinks, still smiling, feeling like a threatened chimpanzee. The son of a bitch rang him at seven yesterday demanding a four-page spread on sea pressures in Alaska. Fucking Bundy put to death just a week ago, too - this office would be the death of him. Sweat gathering on his palms makes his article wet as his boss dismisses him for lunch, the both of them pissed off.

He thinks about it as he sits back down at his desk in the corner of the office, solemnly unwrapping the sandwich he’d gotten earlier in the day. Sloppy, he thinks, prying the top layer of bread off. The mayo’s leaked through the entire thing and soaked it. It’s his usual order, lettuce tomato ham mayo mustard, and it makes him grimace every time he opens that delicate brown paper and sets it down on his desk and swirls the little wooden stirrer in his black filter coffee with two sugars – sits back in his chair – and takes a sip of the coffee and puts the coffee down and picks up the sandwich and takes a bite and it oozes into his mouth even when it’s not supposed to and he thinks about Eyler and Ramirez and Lucas and Toole. Fleetingly, he thinks about killing that bitch of a boss and cutting his head off too, and then he realizes that’s disgusting, and he throws the rest of his sandwich in the garbage, unable to finish it, too enraptured with the thought of scooping the slick gore out of his neck hole and stuffing it in his mouth, that hot spongy cartilage dribbling down his chin.

He gets home that day feeling deranged. It’s a seventeen minute drive between the office and his mousehole apartment in downtown Philly, nine without the rush-time traffic that he tries to avoid, either by skulking around the office block or trying to creep out when nobody’s looking. His knuckles are red when he twists open the front door from gripping the wheel with an angry fever. 

It happens most days. He’s the typical cut-and-dry college graduate who got his degree in journalism, freshly plucked out of the fish tank, then left to flail and gasp on the living-room table, sick of his job the second it’d started, tired of living. He owns rats, actually, not fish – two of them, white girls with ruby red eyes, and the light of his life at the moment. If he’s gonna go to work, he contemplates every day as he slithers out of bed, he’d better do a good job if only for their sakes. His mom lives down in Albuquerque and their lives are blissfully divided. It’s one thing to want to kill someone at work, but it’s a whole new beast to want to kill someone at home, too. 

The rats blink up at him from their cage on the kitchen table as Danny hangs his coat slowly, deliberately on the wall, then approaches. Their enclosure’s a big affair with soft shredded-paper bedding and wire walls, some cardboard tunnels, a driftwood branch running diagonally, their water, and a hammock fixture he’d attached for them to sleep in. He looks down on them with a smile far too tender for his face. 

_How much? he asked, watching two assistants carry two blanketed boxes each by plastic handles. He was already taking his wallet out as they turned around to frown at him. It was night and it was cold out - he was there for poetry classes at the college._

_These are lab rats, fella, said the closest one, jostling a cage, face pulled grim. They’ll cannibalise each other if you keep ‘em together._

__

__

_I don’t want many, Danny replied quickly, fingering through the little leather pockets to pull out a ten dollar bill. Just two. Look, I’ll pay._

_The assistants shared a look and for a moment Danny grew nervous, listening to those ring-a-ling squeaks beneath muffled blankets. Didn’t rats carry the plague? Then they began to consider it, and continued walking, not before gesturing for him to follow. They led him to a dingy little staircase in the backlot of the college, cages rattling as they trotted down the concrete steps, then nudging a door open with their feet, and into a basement. The stench of shit and blood hit him immediately. The walls were crawling with caged rats. There were caged rats on the floor too, illuminated by light bulbs slowly dying. Each and every one held a sea of white and red, bodies wriggling and screaming._

_This is hell, he thought. The assistants seemed unperturbed as they set all four boxes on the only empty table in the room, plucked the blanket off of one, then directed for Danny to take a look._

_Your pick, fella. Danny could barely hear either of their voices over the shrieking._

_He chose the two smallest and least offending and put them in his pockets. When the other assistant asked if he was gonna name them, he shrugged, feeling ill, and left with a migraine tip-toeing his brain. He didn’t eat any dinner that night._

Danny’s smile drops as he looks at them closer. Kiotis is the smaller of the two with rosy-pink ears. She likes carrots and sitting on his shoulders while he drafts new work, tapping along on his little Apple IIe diligently, but now she’s got one eye squinted shut and she keeps rubbing at it with her little paw, unable to sit still. He unlatches the cage, forms his hand into a scoop and gently picks her up. 

“Oh, you poor, sweet thing,” he murmurs, quietly. Red crust has began to form near her nose - he figures she’s scratched it wrong, and he forms his lips into a pout as she pets it at more, stroking the back of his other hand down her back. “Sh, sh, sh, sweetheart..”

Vera, the bigger of the two, stands on her hind legs, trying to get a good look at the intrusion. They’re much bigger than they used to be now and they have a good appetite. Danny figures he’s had them for around four months now, by virtue of counting backwards in his head through the night classes he’s had, but nothing like this has happened thus far and he hasn’t found the need to take them to the vet. He doesn’t know where it is, here; in fact the last time he came across one was on his uncle’s farm, at the ripe age of sixteen. One of the sows was giving birth. Sometimes he remembers watching in apt horror, a blistering afternoon, as a calf spilled from that soft bloody mush with two heads and onto the hay below, cooing gently. Some freak organism it was, long since stuffed into a microwave meal, sliding through someone’s guts and dumped into the toilet as shit. 

He replaces Kiotis and latches the rat cage up carefully, then strides over to his living-room which consists of his couch and his tiny microwave-TV, heaves his phone book up off the floor, and licks his finger to flick through the pages. _U, U, V, VA, VE.._ His pointing stops under the veterinary section. There they were. Philly. He produces his cell phone from his coat across the room, punches their number into it.

The tone-up dial hums in his left ear. Someone chewing gum. Then a woman’s voice, loud and warm. “Hi. Philly vet clinic?”

“Hello,” responds Danny, running his hand over his own thigh, then sticking it in his pocket. “I’m calling up to see about my rat - I- I think she gave herself an eye infection. Looks like she scratched it.”

Shuffling papers. “Mm-hmm.. She had it for long?”

Danny grimaces, wishing he’d seen it sooner. She definitely hadn’t had it this morning. Every day at six-fifty he pours himself a thick coffee with two sugars in his t-shirt and briefs, reads yesterday’s paper (never his own), and feeds Vera and Kiotis before letting them run amok on the floor. “No. This afternoon, if I had to guess.”

“We can fit you in in around an hour, last of the day. I won’t be there, so tell the other woman that Eve Kostenko approved it, okay?”

“That’s perfect, Miss Kostenko. Thank you.” He walks across the room to let the rats sniff his finger. They grab at the bars that separate his touch, and it makes his lips twitch affectionately. Another question pulls him out of the moment.

“Can I take your name?”

“It’s Danny.” He fumbles, “Johnson.”

He can hear Kostenko’s fellow smile on the other side of the line, pen scrib-scribbling, more papers. If he has to guess again, she’s got acrylic nails. “Alrighty then, Danny. We’ll get that all sorted for you. Chow!”


	2. airbag

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> danny goes to the vet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long ;-;)9 @neotheropoda on twitter

When people say ignorance is bliss, they mean it. Danny’s been reminded time and time again. It’s hard to look at Philadelphia the same way after studying the grime under its fingernails.

He can’t say he’s taken any more beatings than the average busybody (if only to remain buoyant in a sea of underpaid reporters similar to himself) but neither can he just look at any city the same way as he did when he got here, two long years ago. The glitz and glamour simply isn’t there. Cynicism is one hell of a drug. Anyone will try to look on the bright side of things if only to keep their head suitcased into reality - Danny’s no different - and yet the dog-eared pages of darker thoughts are always lurking under quiet waters, thin shark fins cutting through with deadly efficiency. It comes with the job.

The sentiment alone casts him back to a story he caught early last year, the memory of which lies on his brain like a hawk as he would recline in bed with his hands interlaced on his stomach, ignoring the radio he still uses to get to sleep; an idle mind is a dangerous one, and yet those dog-ears are hard to flatten once pulled taut. April the eleventh was two days before his birthday. Back then, he owned a police radio and listened to it over dinner, breakfast, kept it in his desk at work. Every ticking second strained to listen to those police reports in search of something worthwhile, in search of something close to snap onto. He remembered the call clearer than his first kiss, even the microwave lasagne he was eating grimly at his kitchen table, and then the sweeter bite of, _thirtyonethirtytwo, distress call on sixtysixth avenue, looks like a domestic homicide.._ and it took exactly twelve seconds for him to stand up, snatch his camera and coat up from where they were crumpled on the floor, to exit without locking the door behind him, sweat pop-pop-popping like pustulas on his forehead. Fifteen to jump down two flights of steps, almost slip on the wet sidewalk as he dived into his car, and take off a block down. It was as if some divine hand had dropped a bucket on that bustling city, engulfing his car, windscreen wipers struggling to combat the downpour. They stilled when Danny pulled up and emerged onto the street once again, shielding his camera from the downpour in the crux of his armpit, hair stuck to his scalp.

He’d heard gunshots before, of course. Growing up near Albuquerque in the sandy jagged arms of mountains meant that was inevitable, a BB rifle hanging off his shoulder as he spent the afternoon scaling them as a young boy, only young, sweating and blistering and bubbling with cousins and classmates, taking with them snacks in worn canvas backpacks, melted cereal bars and lemonade hot to the touch, rifle dangling all the way, catching the twinkle of the sun playfully. They used to sing about him, then, laughing. Always the odd one out, Johnson. _Tic, tac, toe,_ ascending higher, dizzy from the heat but with no adult to warn them otherwise, and he always felt sick with the power that held, _give me high, give me low_ , and when they got to the top, he would sit away from their pinches, and load his rifle, and aim it at the sky, and the rocks, and imagined shooting a salamander and exploding its head into fifty-two fragments, _give me three in a row_ , watching in apt delight as it oozed red ribbons, so fucking _stupid_ in its tiny existence, and then-

_DANNY GOT SHOT BY A U-F-O!_

He could barely look up quick enough to meet the gunshot. A bullet had cleaved through one of the apartment windows above, shattering the glass and spilling it onto the pavement. He heard that sweet serenade a moment later. BANG! He knew the song of the pistol well, a fox amidst bears, a signal of his own growing into a man and no longer a boy, able to fend for himself. 

The bitching of sirens in the distance had him fleeing into the lobby apartment before long, fat globs of rain soaking his neck and collar. This moment wasn’t to last. The police radio.. The police radio.. Fourth floor. 

He barely noticed his legs aching from the climb. When he got to the fourth floor there were police and neighbors gathered round that little door. No journalists. The perfect storm for a story? Perhaps.. The cops pulled out their own guns, one, two and knocked the door down, and Danny followed them in as well, hands furiously working at his camera as he watched in spectacle; the apartment was warm and wet inside, a bullet hole piercing the shut curtains, dark, hot, uterine, the veritable womb encompassing himself and the police officers with its iron-sniffed pulp. He could have felt safe in there, trapped in time and peace and love and comfort and the instinctual need for motherly kindness if it weren’t for the crumpled bodies clad in tiny velvet dresses and splattered across the radiator on the other side of the room, legs spread, mouths open and gurgling, and the screaming of a man being wrestled, veiled only by a thin wall. 

Three women. Girls. Teenagers. There was something sick forming in Danny’s own stomach, too - those long-legged calves with big doughy eyelashes on his uncle’s farm, safe and warm for just one night but ultimately doomed from the start, doomed even in their mothers’ womb - that erupted at the sight of milky eyes like marbles pointed at God, necks bent the wrong way, downright evil at the core, black bloodstains blooming across little velvet dresses. His camera broke when it hit the floor.

He threw away his police radio, after that. The local authorities shunned him after watching him taint the crime scene with his vomit. He stopped worshipping the pistol. Fed pigeons in the park on Saturdays. The shapes of coats on the floor still reminds him of those sandbag figures, and so he has hung them up ever since. 

There is something so eldritch in seeing a human body for oneself. In the echelons of the greats it is easy to see the victim as a byproduct of the crime when that can’t be further from the truth – the victim is the crime, when it’s unjust. Murder disgusts Danny and yet he is drawn to it nonetheless. He chases it between slivers of work, digesting the grisly details of serial killers’ most recent works. He’s a hungry man. He crawls to the edges of Eden for something that makes him feel ill.

_Smooth Criminal_ plays on the car ride up to the vet clinic. 

It’s the kind of beat that has Danny bopping his head, tapping his fingers one-by-one on the broad steering wheel of his 1980 Plymouth Volare, in mild spirits despite the worry he feels for the rat in the passenger seat, curled up in a bed of straw, in a cardboard box. He’d since changed out of his work clothes into just slacks and a plaid shirt, a thin leather belt curled around his waist, something comfortable, prepared to stay for as long as he needed. Veterinarians don’t make him nervous (he can’t remember the face of the two that arrived that summer’s day, probably for the best) but any responsible pet owner would gnaw for some professional solace in knowing they haven’t done wrong. He’s just that, isn’t he? Responsible. That’s why he’s taking her to the vet, after all.

The drive isn’t really torturous as per usual; it’s good to be driving out of Philly, wading from those swampy concrete depths and onto shore. To drive for some purpose other than work makes him feel alright. The sun always sets early come winter and he lets himself take in the sight of it falling in the distance, feeling, if only momentarily, just a little better about life. It comes up in the morning over sea and hill, casting bright shadows onto the waters, and it falls at night, crashing into the blocky horizon of Philadelphia. How many people are looking at the same sight as him, right now? Perhaps his uncle sat on the dusty porch of his Southern ranch, those old wrinkled shoulders sun-kissed, exposed from his vest, wearing what Danny imagines to be a bandana, red or blue. Those big arms, both raised up. One hand to his face to suck a cigarette, and the other cranking, in slow motions, a boy-sized mincing machine.

“Shit,” he says out loud without meaning to, drowned by the sound of Michael Jackson’s falsetto. It takes him a moment to notice he’s drifted to the side on the road, brought alight again from Kiotis’ insistent squeaking in the passenger seat and the sun in his eyes. He pulls the visor down, squinting hard. In the mirror he can see his reflection. He sees skin licked by honey and shoulder-length hair. He sees brown-black roots leaking from his scalp into bleach, dark eyes but darker bags under them, and chapped mouths pulled into a grimace.

The good feelings don’t ever last. Beautiful sunsets fade some day, and the pictures taken of them wither in some corpse’s attic. Soon that crunchy radio feels mocking. His lips are crusty. They remind him of a man who hates taking care of himself.

This sort of anger comes quickly and it comes hard, flaring up from the dog-ear depths of his mind. To think of killing salamanders. Punching his boss and thrashing his janitor for not cleaning the stairs and only the elevator, as if every minor inconvenience in his life had been uprooted all at once, having no toilet paper in the bathroom because he left it on the kitchen counter, or being caught in traffic and slamming his head on the steering wheel, completely unable to stop crying from the most basic instinct, like a baby. Kiotis is mercifully quiet now. He punches the off button on his dashboard to spend the rest of the drive in silence. 

Philly’s pet clinic is a small, one-floor building squashed between an industrial complex, lost in the gargantuan cracks of corrugated steel. Danny finds himself picking through the metal maze aimlessly, his frustration having simmered and petered out by the time that he has to ask a nearby worker where, exactly, it is. It’s always seeing someone else’s face in real time that gets him, brings him down from that insurmountable shaking fury, the worker looking at him boredly, seeing him as just another face in the crowd. It’s humbling. _You ain’t a god, Danny. You ain’t even a man._

He pulls up to the clinic, grabs Kiotis’ box in both hands, shuts the car door with his ass, and enters the clinic. There’s just one other soul sitting in the waiting room, some old woman with a big, black mean-looking dog sitting under her chair, its tongue lolling, its ears sticking up like devil horns, eyes gleaming when they catch the light. Danny’s gaze brushes over it, almost admirably, as he strides over to the receptionist; but he’s immediately disappointed in that facet, seeing her and finding her to be nothing special at all. Just another tragedy of modern living, soothing in its familiarity. He tracks her as she scribbles on a sheet. When he clears his throat she looks up. Come, little sheep. Bow to your shepherd. 

“Sorry,” she says, “we aren’t accepting any more patients today.”

 _Jokes on you, bitch_. He hauls Kiotis’ box to place it on the high ridge of the reception desk. “Eve Kostenko approved me. My name’s Danny Johnson. I should be on your list.” And he reaches down to point at his name on it, to which she reels back. “John-son. See?”

“Oh.” She blinks. “Yes.. Sorry, Mr Johnson, you are.” He watches her scribble a little more. “Your rat.. Mmhm.. Okay. If you’d like to take a seat, the vet will be out for you in just a moment.” He doesn’t need directions, but she sits up to point her pen at the seats anyway, and he takes Kiotis’ box and places it on his lap, with only a brief glance at the black dog a couple of rows away. It stares at him, dark eyes glistening as if drowning in oil. 

He tears his own away to stick his finger in his rat’s enclosure.

“Don’t worry, little girly,” he whispers, furling and unfurling his finger; his nails are getting long, now. She takes his digit gingerly in both paws and rubs her head against it. “Poor thing.. Vera must miss you terribly.”

They’ve barely been separated since he bought them, that swarm of warm bodies in a college basement. When he thinks about it, it’s not too unlike his job. Isn’t he an experiment, when it comes down to it? Aren’t all three of the people in this room? Experiments for all the big pharma out there to ogle at, another number for government preaching, tracking him to and fro his ballot. He doesn’t consider himself a fanatic about these things (more of a pessimist) but any journalist with two brain cells to rub together would have read Orwell, and any journalist with a trio can see the links between modern society and the ramblings of old. Speeding cameras on the way here jotting his car number plate down in their databases, even calling Kostenko on the way here. He watches Kiotis squint, inflamed and leaking sickly yellow pus onto snowy white fur. Inside lies the red ring of a camera. He can see it, when she stares at him, fickle and entranced.

Kiotis.. Kostenko.. He’s thinking of Kostenko, now. Hopefully she’s better looking than the receptionist at the desk. There’s something a little seductive about hearing just someone’s voice, not knowing just what they look like, tinkering images just by sound. Romance can sprout even in dystopia, right? Stealing kisses in the gaps between video monitoring, the simple existence of love, a crime. Didn’t Winston and Julia make love before being caught? He imagines long, black– no, blonde hair, in ringlets cascading down her back. That cheerful voice, ringing aloud through the crackle of the phone. Receptionist’s clothes, but the nice kind. Air-headed. She dresses up nicely for work even though she gets dog hair on her blouse. Her bra has frills on it.. Her breasts are.. She’s..

He frowns to himself, clutching the sides of Kiotis’ box. Get a grip.

The vet comes before he can slap himself. It’s a man. He notices nothing immediately special about him but the shape of his nose, eyeing him up with distinctly impersonal disdain before following him into another room. It’s a smaller office space with a big metal table in the middle which he’s instructed to set Kiotis’ box on; the vet clicks and clacks at the clunky computer in the corner for a moment, boring Danny, before standing and taking a peek at her.

“Let’s see here, hm?” Let’s see indeed. “Kiotis.. You know, my niece is called Kiotis.”

 _Why do I care?_ thinks Danny. _You’re just a service to me. Do you think I want to be here, you piece of shit? I wanna cut off your nose and suck the cartilage out of it. Stick my tongue deep inside until I’m licking your brain. Like a real screwed-up porno. Would you moan..? Be honest._ Instead he says “it’s a good name” as the vet pulls on latex gloves and snaps them against his wrists. His arms are hairy.

He smiles when he realises ‘name’ rhymes with ‘brain’. And then he’s not smiling anymore. That’s disgusting. You’re here for your pet because you love her, he thinks, and the vet is here because he loves animals. He watches as the other man takes Kiotis out of her box and places her onto the table.

“Eve told me the infection’s been around since this afternoon?” he asks, stroking the rat with his thumbs gently. Danny notices how long his eyelashes are. How marvellous it is to notice these things in close proximity.

The question makes him a little nervous, once he finally processes it. “Yeah. That’s when I noticed it, anyway.”

“Right, right.” The vet uses his fingernails to pry her bad eye open, which makes Danny grimace and hate him again, even if Kiotis doesn’t seem to be in any foul disposition from it. They’re _his_ rats. He prays the vet’s fingernails are shorter than his own, lest he hurt her. “Well.. It looks like a corneal ulcer.” He says a couple of words that Danny doesn’t understand, then asks him if that’s okay, and Danny says uh-huh. He’s instructed to hold Kiotis while the vet takes a long torch out of one of the drawers in the room. It looks like one of the things you stick in your ear to measure the temperature. When he returns he shines it deep into Kiotis’ eye. “Yep, corneal ulcer. Poor thing must have been in agony.”

He sinks deeper into misery. “Jeez.”

The man makes a _tch_ sound with his tongue. Glimpsing the pink piece of muscle, Danny wonders if he would die of blood loss when he bit it off, or whether he would tourniquet it in time, thinking so fast, so brilliantly. This man is better looking than him, and it’s annoying. “Mm. The best solution would be to remove it, if she lives with other rats.” He looks up dubiously, and although he knows it’s supposed to be light-hearted, Danny digs deeper into the expression and finds some fragment of malice. “She does live with other rats, right?”

“Of course. One other.”

He nods. “It’s a relatively simple procedure. We sedate her, remove the eye, put her on some antibiotics, and she’ll be fine come a couple of days. Rats do perfectly well with just one. This’ll be a real relief for her, I’m sure.” He picks Kiotis up, holds her to his face. 

Removing the camera.. It’s hard to fathom, still. The world is moving in slow motion, at half its normal speed, the same sentiment as staring at a clock or lying in bed in the dark watching the ceiling, thinking to yourself that hours have passed, but checking your alarm and seeing it’s only been five minutes, because you’re always wrong. Outside the window is darkness. The world is but himself, his vet, and Kiotis, and it’s all he needs. Danny thinks, what are eyes for, if only to see this darkness? What have eyes done for rats, and what have rats done for people? You don’t need to see ambrosia to eat it, only to feel it, to smell it, to taste it, and to swallow, feeling that warm stickiness, slug-like, crawl down your throat..

“Does that sound okay, Mr. Johnson?”

“Totally. So I come pick her up tomorrow?” he asks, hands in the pockets of his jeans. 

“That’s the plan.. I’ll be here ‘til midnight, so if anything goes wrong we’ll call you before then. The receptionist can help you out with payment plans.. We can stagger them if you prefer.”

It’s always about the money. You have to pay to keep things alive. Praying’s never enough. “Yup. Thanks..” Corneal ulcer. He watches the fly a few moments longer, and then a thought pops into his head-- yes, yes, and he tells himself that he’s pointing it out not for the vet’s satisfaction but the happiness of his pet, “oh yeah, she loves carrots. She’ll be crawling all over you if you have one.”

The vet hums, smiles. He has a nice one. Motherfucker. “I’ll keep that in mind.” 

He ends up staggering the payments, just as the vet suggested. The receptionist doesn’t seem all too happy to be staying later than typical, but he can’t blame the sheep for getting bored; she’s picking at her cuticles with her thumbnails when he walks in, and yawns into her elbow when he approaches, lethargic in the way she moves as if shackled to that broad desk. She rushes the paperwork. He doesn’t mind - he just watches her and her pen, scribbling away. One payment, two payments, and he thinks, _you’ll be eating beans for a couple weeks, Johnson_ , mindlessly, elbow rested on the side. Looking here he can see that the woman and her dog have gone. The seat is empty.

“That was some dog, huh?” he mumbles, half to her, and half to himself. “Like a.. A German Shepherd?”

She hums, but it’s a question, head tilted as she continues writing. What’s she thinking of? Maybe everything, maybe nothing. Maybe her pen is sentient, working independently from her brain, so that she doesn’t have to think for anything at all. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I don’t follow.”

“The dog?” She still doesn’t look up. Why isn’t she looking up? “The big black one? With the woman?” 

“We haven’t had anything like that in today.” She makes a point to rustle through a list of inpatients. “No black dogs.. One Jack Russell,” she waves her hand around, “little.. Yappy thing.”

Danny chews his tongue. “Right.” Like that’s easy to believe. _Dumb forgetful bitch_. He doesn’t call her that, but he wants to. “Must’ve been my imagination.” She ignores that and he realizes it’s probably for the better.

When she hands the paper back he takes a good look at it without really reading it – no price is too high for my girl, he thinks. Deciding that the numbers are just fine he nods, signs the contract underneath it, and bids her goodbye for the night. Maybe she’ll rest well and maybe she won’t.

As he’s getting back into his car, stepping out into the warm evening air, he hears a call from behind him, from the clinic. It’s the vet again, wearing an apron and gloves, showing off the lines of his big arms. “Mr. Johnson? This might be a strange question – I was wondering whether you have any children?”

Danny blinks. Then he laughs. “No. No kids. Not in a million years.”

The vet seems to find that funny too, but it’s nervous laughter in reply, as if he regretted asking. “Of course. I was just curious..” He shakes his head. “It’s fine. Drive safe.”

“Yeah.” He slots his key into the car door, twists it, gets inside. Pulls the handbrake, eases the clutch, and leaves the parking lot. He steals one last glance at the clinic as it escapes his view – a flat, small building, sickly yellow lights aghast and bleeding into the night, and stares at the vet, as he watches him leave.


End file.
